David Linthicum suggests that SOA infrastructure vendors must switch to a cloud pricing model and get paid only on delivering value, further taunting the vendors to put their money behind their products. Interesting proposition... But I don't believe it will work. And the comparison to cloud or SaaS may not even be valid. For SaaS, its easy to identify the value delivered - as that of a business solution being made available as a service. For cloud, the SLAs are at the platform level and can only ensure availability - they cannot ensure business value. On-premise SOA is even worse because the operating platform is not even in the SOA vendors control, so guaranteeing even the availability at the same level as cloud is not even possible. At best the vendor can assure that the SOA platform will not fail, but they definitely cannot guarantee against failure from the hardware, OS or other layers in the solution stack that reside with or on the on-premise SOA.
The business value that David refers to is way beyond just platform availability, and that surely cannot be assured by any single component in the overall solution stack - unlike in the SaaS model where the SaaS provider controls the complete solution stack and can provide the guarantees.